In corporate, enterprise and data center networking environments servers or processing devices may replicate processing functions across multiple servers or processing devices in order to provide greater processing capabilities. Although the identical functionality may be replicated across multiple servers or processing devices, each device is associated with its own address and as such, requests for the functionality must be sent to a specific one of the multiple servers or computing devices.
As processing requirements increase, a load balancer may be placed in front of the plurality of servers or computing devices to distribute traffic between the servers. The load balancer receives data from a connecting client, selects an appropriate server and forwards the data to the selected server.
The functionality provided by the servers may include Internet Protocol Security (IPsec) services. IPsec tunnels may be established between an initiating computing device and one of the servers either as a destination end point or as a transit point. However, the same server must process all of the traffic associated with an individual IPsec tunnel in order to maintain an IPsec tunnel. IPsec tunnels therefore present challenges enabling load balancing of network traffic.
Therefore there is a need for improved load balancing of IPsec traffic in a network.